1. Clinton Twice Refused to Apologize for Using Private Email, Secret Server
2. “I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions.”
After refusing to apologize twice, Clinton’s nonapology apology is to suggest that the situation is too complex for us to understand. The reality is, none of this would be an issue if Clinton had been transparent and up front from the start and had not set up a secret server. She has no one to blame but herself.
3. “I take classified material very, very seriously. And we followed all the rules on classified material.”
Although it has been confirmed that Hillary Clinton both sent and received classified information on unsecured networks several times a month, Hillary repeated the claim that she did not send classified material on her secret email server.
Even worse, Hillary has continually tried to dismiss her mishandling of classified information as a laughing matter. A recent email released by the State Department also shows Clinton telling a staffer wary of sending classified information over her private network to “just send it.”
4. “…I was not thinking a lot when I got in”
So Clinton takes classified material very seriously, but didn’t think the security and protocol of her primary means of communication was something she should think about when she became Secretary of State? Clinton cites the “convenience” of using her personal email, but wouldn’t it have been more convenient to comply with the setup and rules that were already clearly setup for the State Department’s government email system?
5. “There are answers to all of these questions and I will continue to provide those answers.”
The facts don’t match the talking points. Just this week, the State Department bobbedand weaved through a series of straightforward questions about Hillary’s email practices.
And then there’s this…
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
What’s clear is Hillary Clinton regrets that she got caught and is paying a political price, not the fact her secret email server put our national security at risk. Hillary Clinton’s repeated distortions of her growing email scandal, which now involves an FBI investigation, and her refusal to apologize only reinforce why three-fifths of the country doesn’t trust her.
WASHINGTON — Renewed calls for more restrictive gun laws, following a succession of fatal shootings in the United States, immediately appear to be generating a boost for the gun industry.
Newly released August records show that the FBI posted 1.7 million background checks required of gun purchasers at federally licensed dealers, the highest number recorded in any August since gun checks began in 1998. The numbers follow new monthly highs for June (1.5 million) and July (1.6 million), a period which spans a series of deadly gun attacks — from Charleston to Roanoke — and proposals for additional firearm legislation.
While the FBI does not track actual gun sales, as multiple firearms can be included in a transaction by a single buyer, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System's numbers are an indicator of a market upswing in the face of growing anxiety about access to guns.
"Whenever there is a call for gun control, sales increase,'' said Larry Keane, general counsel for the firearm industry trade association National Shooting Sports Foundation. "Unfortunately, this is a pattern that repeats itself.''
The summer trend is not on par with the panic buying boom that followed the 2012Newtown massacre, which jump-started state and federal campaigns for a host of new firearm measures. During the months that followed the Connecticut attack, which featured new calls for an assault weapons ban and expanded background checks, apprehensive gun buyers emptied the shelves of dealers across the country. Yet, the recent uptick represents a similar buying pattern that dates to the uneasy period before 1994 adoption of the assault weapons ban. (That ban expired in 2004.)
Virginia Del. Patrick Hope, a Democratic member of the state Assembly who proposed an expansion of background checks following last month's shooting deaths of two journalists near Roanoke, said the stockpiling of weapons represented an "over-reaction.''
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her family reportedly paid a State Department staffer to maintain the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state.
The Washington Post, citing an unnamed campaign official, reports the arrangement helped Clinton maintain her personal control over the server that she used to conduct public and private business. The official also said it also ensured that taxpayers weren’t paying for the upkeep of the server that was shared by Clinton, her husband, the former president, and their daughter as well as former aides, the Post reports.
The State Department staffer in question, Bryan Pagliano, told a congressional committee that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights instead of testifying about the private server. A congressional source told Fox News on Friday that investigators on the Benghazi Select Committee hoped to question Pagliano, a former IT specialist, over possible destruction of evidence.
Pagliano served as Clinton’s IT director of her 2008 campaign committee and then on her political action committee, according to The Post. He installed and managed her server and left his IT job at the State Department in February 2013, the same month Clinton stepped down as secretary.
The Post reports the Clintons paid Pagliano $5,000 for “computer services” prior to him joining the State Department, according to a 2009 financial disclosure form he filed. After he arrived on the State Department’s staff in 2009, he continued to be paid by the Clintons to maintain the server, a campaign official and another person familiar with the arrangement told The Post.
When asked about whether the former IT specialist had been paid privately to maintain the server, a State Department official said the agency “found no evidence that he ever informed the department that he had outside income,” The Post reports. This week, a different State Department official, couldn’t clarify to the newspaper Pagliano’s pay situation.
Pagliano reportedly didn’t list any outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year. The Post reports he remains a State Department contractor doing work on “mobile and remote computing functions,’ according to the State Department.
It’s not known exactly when or who “wiped” Clinton’s personal email server. However, it seems clear the move came after October 2014, when the State Department requested personal emails be returned as part of her business records.
Committee Republicans have long argued they don’t have all the documents that should be available to the investigation, after Clinton, using her personal discretion, purged some 30,000 emails.
Fox News put additional questions to Pagliano’s attorney, Mark J. MacDougall, Friday about whether his client played a direct role or had knowledge of the server scrub, but MacDougall said there was nothing further to add beyond the letter.
An intelligence source who confirmed to Fox that the FBI’s “A-team” was handling the Clinton email case, described the investigation as “moving along well,” adding investigators remain “confident” deleted records can be recovered because whoever did the scrub may “not be a very good IT guy. There are different standards to scrub when you do it for government vs. commercial.”
The conservative sage on the decline of intellectual debate, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and what the welfare state has done to black America.
Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?
“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”
The paradox is that serious economic discussion enjoys a wider platform than ever before. One of the great bounties of the Internet is the trove of archival news and debate footage that has been dumped onto YouTube and other websites. Anyone with a modem can now watch F.A. Hayekdiscussing, in a soft and dignified German accent, the rule of law with Robert Bork in 1978. Or Milton Friedman at Cornell the same year, arguing matter-of-factly about colonialism with a young man in a beard, sunglasses and floppy sideways hat.
There is plenty of old footage of Mr. Sowell floating through the ether, too, and if one watches a few clips—say, his appearance on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line” in 1981—two things stand out. The first is how little Mr. Sowell has changed. The octogenarian who sits before me in an office at the Hoover Institution, where Mr. Sowell has been a senior fellow since 1980, has a bit of gray hair and a different set of glasses, but the self-assurance and the baritone voice are the same.
The second thing that strikes is how little the political debate has changed. Maybe economics isn’t merely a dismal science, but a futile one.
Take the minimum wage. In 1981, a year in which the federally mandated hourly pay rose to $3.35 from $3.10 (in today’s dollars that would be to $8.79 from $8.14), Mr. Sowell argued on “Firing Line” that the minimum wage increases unemployment by pricing unskilled workers—young minorities in particular—out of the job market. It’s the same point he makes today, as activists call for a minimum wage of $10.10, or even $15.
“When looking back over my life, I think of the lucky things that happened to me. And one of the luckiest ones, I just realized recently, is that when I left home as a 17-year-old high-school dropout, the unemployment rate among black 17-year-old males was in single digits,” Mr. Sowell says. “In 1948, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was 10 years old and it hadn’t been changed. And there was huge inflation, and so it was as if there was no minimum wage.” He got a series of jobs—delivering Western Union telegrams, working in a machine shop—that put him on the right path.
Which is not to say that life was easy: In his 2002 memoir, “A Personal Odyssey,” Mr. Sowell describes how he once pawned a suit of clothes to buy food—a knish and an orange soda at a little restaurant on the Lower East Side in New York City. “Since then I’ve eaten at the Waldorf Astoria, I’ve eaten in Parisian restaurants and in the White House,” he tells me. “But no meal has ever topped that knish and orange soda.”
Or take “disparate impact,” the idea that different outcomes among different groups—say, that there are more male CEOs than female—is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. The Obama administration has used disparate impact to charge racism in housing, employment and other matters. In the absence of discrimination, the theory goes, people naturally would be dispersed more or less at random. Nonsense, Mr. Sowell says. “In various books I’ve given lists of all the great disparities all over the world, and I recently saw a column by Walter Williams in which he added that men are bitten by sharks several times as often as women.”
Differences in outcome is a matter that Mr. Sowell takes up in his new book, “Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective,” out Sept. 8. Its theme, he says, is that “in a sense, there was never any rational reason to believe that there would be this evenness that they presuppose.” Some continents have more navigable rivers and deep water harbors than others. Some cultures value education highly, and some don’t. Underwhelming as the conclusion might sound to those with the urge to reorder society, many disparities arise simply because people are different, and because they make different choices.
Another problem is that the “disparate impact” assumption misidentifies where group differences originate. He sets up an example: “If you have people in various groups in the country, and their kids are all raised differently, they all behave differently in school, they do differently in school. And now they’re grown up and they go to an employer, and you’re surprised to find that they’re not distributed randomly by income.” It’s “just madness,” he says, to assume “that because you collected the statistics there, that’s where the unfairness originated.”
Maury County parents are expressing concern after their children came home with world history schoolwork containing references to Islam and its teachings.
The school district contends the curriculum has been in place for more than three decades, and world history is difficult to teach without referencing religions.
Brandee Porterfield has a daughter in seventh grade at Spring Hill Middle School. She said her daughter brought home school materials containing the Five Pillars of Islam. While she agrees that Islam is part of history and does not have a problem with schools teaching about the religion, she said the lesson skipped a chapter about Christianity.
Porterfield said school officials moved past the chapter because it was not part of the state’s standards.
“I have big problem with that. From a historical point of view, that’s a lot of history these kids are missing,” she said. “Also, for them to spend three weeks on Islam after having skipped Christianity, it seems to be that they are making a choice about which religion to discuss.”
The mother said she was concerned about her child being taught the “Shahada,” the Muslim profession of faith which was contained in a foldable teaching material.
One of the translations of the creed reads, “There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”
“I have no problem with the teacher at all. It’s just that yellow foldable seems to be teaching our children religion in schools, and only that religion,” Porterfield said. “From a religion point of view, if the schools are going to be teaching religion in history, they need to teach them all equally.”
Lately, there has been a lot of hype about Donald Trump’s comments on illegal immigration. I’ve seen post after post on Facebook from Hispanics saying they’ll do everything in their power to make sure Trump isn’t elected president because of his tough stance on immigration. People who were otherwise uninterested in politics are suddenly becoming engaged.
While I don’t agree with everything Trump says and does, I have to agree with him on this one issue: America’s border with Mexico needs to be secured. Hispanics across the nation should agree with that concept, even if they don’t agree with his reasoning.
Whenever people – Hispanics in particular – talk about illegal immigration, most cite the American Dream as the reason illegal aliens cross the border.
“They want a better life for themselves.”
“They want their kids to have better opportunities.”
“They contribute to our nation.”
“They do the jobs no one else wants to do.”
Those are all common phrases that have been regurgitated beyond recognition. It’s the mantra we’ve been exposed to for generations. It’s as if we’re supposed to agree with this notion because it’s been repeated so many times. Maybe if we keep repeating it, we’ll eventually believe it, we tell ourselves.
Hispanics, however, should want the border to be secure. They should strive to protect America. You can’t achieve the American Dream without accepting all of America, including our laws.
What makes our nation so great is the number of opportunities we’re presented with. The reason we’re presented with these opportunities is because of America’s unique position in the world. We allow people to make their own decisions, about what’s best for them, often without judgment. As long as we’re not causing harm to someone else, we’re often left to our own devices. If we were a lawless nation, we wouldn’t be as prosperous as we are. Instead of working hard to get a leg up, citizens would steal and loot from businesses. There would be no incentive to have a job. If we were a lawless nation, we would be as corrupt as other countries. Americans would be afraid to walk down the street. They would fear for their safety.
Cubans who fled from the Castro regime are often thankful to call America home. Our nation shielded them from persecution by a horrific dictator. We opened our arms – and our hearts – to those in need. We were a safe haven for those who were being harmed. We were able to provide that life to these refugees because our laws dictated our lifestyle and the society we’ve built.
Securing our borders ensures that we protect the society we’ve built. Having the right of passage into the United States – done through the legal channels – is the very first test of the American Dream. If you don’t come to America by applying for a visa or citizenship and you decide to cross the border illegally, you’ve automatically denied yourself the American Dream, the same American Dream you set after. By breaking America’s laws, you’re bringing the lawlessness of your homeland with you.
Beth Baumann is a public relations professional in Southern California and a contributor for PolitiChicks.
Clinton’s politically appointed State Department information technology manager had no national security experience and may have enjoyed a 55 percent pay hike after Clinton departed as secretary of state in February 2013, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
Bryan Pagliano joined Clinton in 2009 as a top-level IT strategist and adviser. He previously was IT director of Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The White House personnel office must approve political appointees before they are hired.
Pagliano was hired as a GS-15 even though he had no national security experience or security clearance. He was paid $140,000 annually at the outset but that was reduced to $136,000 in 2011 and 2012, according to the Asbury Park Press, which posts federal compensation data.
Pagliano described himself at the State Department on his LinkedIn page as a “strategic advisor and special projects manager” to the department’s Chief Technology Officer.
He was assigned to the State Department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management, a highly classified system which manages the digital traffic of 50,000 U.S. diplomats and foreign service officers at the 250 U.S. embassies and consulates located around the world.
Prior to working for Hillary’s presidential campaign, Pagliano was a senior systems engineer at Community IT Innovators, a small IT firm that catered to non-profit organizations. The organization represented liberal advocacy groups, community services organizations, schools and NGO’s, according to its web site.
It happened in the Commonwealth of Kentucky where Judge David Bunning ordered U.S. Marshalls to arrest Kim Davis - the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky.
Mrs. Davis is a devout Christian who refused to issue gay marriage licenses. She claimed that doing so would violate her religious beliefs.
Davis is represented by the public interest law firm Liberty Counsel. The firm’s attorneys asked the court to accommodate her beliefs by simply removing her name from the licenses.
WASHINGTON, DC — In this week's address, the President recognized Labor Day by highlighting the economic progress our country has made, and underlining what needs to be done to continue that growth. Our businesses have created 13.1 million new jobs over the past five and a half years, the unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been in seven years, and seventeen states across the country have raised the minimum wage. The President stressed that to continue this progress, Congress needs to avoid a government shutdown that would hurt middle-class Americans and pass a responsible budget before the end of September. The President emphasized that Congress should not play games with our economy, and instead pass a budget that invests in our middle-class and helps those who work hard and play by the rules to get ahead.
HOUSTON, Texas — The funeral service for Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth was held 11 AM, Friday, September 4, 2015 at the 2nd Baptist Church on Woodway.
On August 28th, while in uniform, Deputy Goforth was putting gasoline in his Harris County Sheriff’s patrol car when he was shot at point blank range 15 times.
The first things you notice upon arriving at the church were the many trees with blue ribbons. There was a police helicopter high above the church. All parking lot area national flags were at half-staff. There were about 20 TV trucks in the parking lot. The funeral was a national event. It was truly a celebration of this man’s life.
Photo: Breitbart Texas/Bob Price
Inside there was a full church. Deputy Goforth’s casket was in front of the church with a large American flag. There were 11,000 peace officers and supporters from coast to coast. 2nd Baptist Church has glorious stain glass windows. The main room seats 5,000 and the adjoining halls seat several thousand additional people. Many peace officers brought their family members.
The ceremony began with large screen photos of a loving Darren Goforth family. There were pictures of his wife Kathleen, his son Ryan and daughter Ava.
Since ancient Greek times the most noble act is to give your life in service of one’s county. Deputy Goforth gave his life in service of our community.
Photo: Breitbart Texas/Bob Price
Members of the local Sheriff and police departments began by noting the community outpouring of support. Darren’s children now have 4,000 surrogate parents, said the Sheriff’s Office chaplain. They have lost their father. The officers delivering the eulogy explained how Darren was well liked, hardworking, and effective. He loved humor and he was a genuine person.
Then Dr. Ed Young of 2nd Baptist delivered the Message. He began with a reading from Exodus. The passaged noted priests in ancient Israel wore blue as a symbol of authority. Dr. Young looked out and pointed to the sea of blue in the audience. Then he referred to the Lord’s Prayer when we asked “to be delivered from evil.” “Deliver” is an interesting world since it means to protect and save, he explained.
There is no definition of “evil” in Webster’s the pastor said. Dr. Young’s definition of evil is “anything that conflicts with the purpose of God.”
“The good news is that evil cannot win!!” he promised. He continued, explaining that peace officers’ job description is to deliver us from evil. What is horrendous is now evil is attacking the blue uniform in the death of Deputy Goforth. Now is time for healing, not revenge. Go out and service, protect, and deliver us from evil.
Harris County Sheriff’s Honor Guard fires a 21-gun salute.
We then went outside. Dismissal with a rifle salute and departure of the funeral cortege. When the ceremony ended dark clouds arrived and there was a light rain after the ceremony.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is spending over $200,000 to create a mobile game that will teach young teens in Kenya to use condoms.
The game also seeks to “educate very young adolescents” about HIV and “harmful gender norms.”
“The overall goal of the proposed project is to contribute to reductions in HIV incidence among youth in sub- Saharan Africa,” according to the NIH grant. “The objective of our proposed study is to advance that goal by developing, building and pilot-testing an interactive electronic game for preadolescents that will be informed by socio-behavioral and pedagogical theories, evidence-based practice, and unique formative research on youth sexual culture in sub- Saharan Africa.”
The primary goal of the project is to “design and develop a mobile phone game for young Kenyans ages 11-14 focused on increasing age at sexual debut and condom use at first sex.”
The game will be tested on 60 young teens in western Kenya to see whether they are willing to play the game and to evaluate how much they like it.
Researchers believe the game could reduce unintended pregnancy, “challenge harmful gender norms and HIV stigma, and foster dialogue with parents and guardians.”
Despite its significant shortcomings, we have passed a point of no return. Accepting this deal and moving forward with vigilance and continued commitment to keeping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is preferable to a world in which a debilitated sanctions regime and fractured community of nations allows Iran to acquire many of the benefits of this deal without accepting its meaningful constraints.
Over the past several weeks I have studied the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action and exhaustively explored the possible ramifications of this agreement and its alternatives. I've consulted with an array of experts on both sides of the debate, sat in classified briefings, discussed it with former and current White House leadership, and benefited from the wise insights of both Republican and Democratic colleagues in the Senate. I also studied Iran and its history, its decades-long efforts to illicitly obtain a nuclear weapon and the evil nature and horrific extent of its support and sponsorship of terrorism, its destabilizing involvement in ongoing regional conflicts, and its destructive hatred and determination to destroy the United States and our ally Israel.
I have come to recognize that on both sides of this debate there are people who want peace and share my fervent determination to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Both those who support this deal and those who oppose it have reasonable arguments as to why their chosen path is the right one or the better option for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran without the necessity for military conflict.
After hours and hours of study, research, deliberation and consultation, I am more convinced than ever that eliminating the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is among the most important global security challenges of our time. Allowing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon would pose an unacceptable and grave threat to the safety of our allies, to Middle East stability, and to American security.
We began negotiations with Iran at a time when our sanctions regime was having its most significant impact on the Iranians. We were gaining maximum leverage on Iran through coordinated economic sanctions with our international partners. We joined with our partner nations at the outset of negotiations with the stated intention of preventing Iran from having the capability to get a nuclear weapon.
Unfortunately, it's clear we didn't achieve that objective and have only delayed – not blocked – Iran's potential nuclear breakout.
But, with the JCPOA, we have now passed a point of no return that we should have never reached, leaving our nation to choose between two imperfect, dangerous and uncertain options. Left with these two choices, I nonetheless believe it is better to support a deeply flawed deal, for the alternative is worse. Thus, I will vote in support of the deal. But the United States must recognize that to make this deal work, we must be more vigilant than ever in fighting Iranian aggression.
Make no mistake, this deal, while falling short of permanently eliminating Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon, succeeds in either delaying it or giving us the credible ability to detect significant cheating on their part and respond accordingly. It establishes historically unprecedented mechanisms to block Iran's near-term pathway to a nuclear weapon. This deal will remove 98 percent of Iran's enriched uranium stockpile—taking the amount of fissile material from 12,000kg – enough to make multiple bombs – to 300kg, which isn't close to enough material for even one. None of their enrichment will be underground at the Fordow facility. The agreement will remove and fill with concrete the core of Iran's heavy water reactor at Arak. The deal will establish the most robust monitoring and inspections regime ever negotiated, covering Iran's entire nuclear supply chain for 15 years. Some of the most intrusive monitoring, including of its uranium mines and mills and centrifuge production facilities, will last well beyond that period. The agreement will also establish strict limits on Iran's research and development for the next 10 years.
A single action can define a legacy. If President Barack Obama rejects the Keystone XL pipeline in the next few weeks, as appears likely, it will solidify the impression that the administration is fully committed to action on climate change and generally opposed to domestic energy production. While this legacy may charm some on the left, it perpetuates a false choice between abundance and sustainability, sacrificing a unique opportunity to depolarize the energy and climate debate. It also happens to be at odds with the president's actual record on energy policy.
Obama's term has been marked by a profound resurgence in domestic energy production. Since he took office, domestic oil production has risen 75 percent and natural gas production increased by 25 percent. America has gone from being an energy weakling worried about rising dependence to an energy superpower fighting over whether to allow crude oil exports.
The president's energy production stance has been evident in his support for natural gas production despite progressives' opposition to drilling and fracking. In his 2013 State of the Union Address, Obama asserted, "The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. And that's why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits." Consistent with this pledge, the Department of Energy has worked to speed up the permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities enabling increased gas production to serve a global market. While the administration recently strengthened air pollution requirements for future oil and gas wells, it opted not to regulate existing production, which is where the bulk of emissions and compliance costs lie.
The administration is also employing creative statutory interpretations to avoid adding the lesser prairie chicken and sage grouse to the endangered species list – a move that would greatly complicate energy development in the West. Despite the worst environmental accident in U.S. history, the administration worked aggressively to restart offshore oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. And just this month, the Interior Department gave the go-ahead to allow oil exploration in the Arctic.
Of course, the administration has not always been in the oil industry's corner. The president rarely misses a rhetorical opportunity to beat up on "subsidies to big oil." The administration has adopted strict drilling regulations on federal land, and many in the industry believe more aggressive air quality standards will come. Moreover, administration critics rightly point out virtually all the recent increases in energy production have occurred on private lands. However, the administration's decision to stay out of the way was a choice that should not be lightly dismissed.
Some see contradictions in the president's actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while supporting domestic energy production. But far from contradictory, efforts to embrace both the present and the future is the essence of sound energy policy. Those who believe we can accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels by blocking critical pipeline infrastructure and market opportunities like the export of U.S. oil are simply wrong. It doesn't work.
